Editor’s Note: Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston back on the ground in Utah covering the 2026 Sundance Film Festival for the grand finale out in Park City. He’s already very busy. Check out our preview of the 2026 festival; keep it locked to our full coverage of Sundance reviews from this year’s festival as they go live, and check out our full archives of past editions.
It never really fails to amaze me that Andrew Stanton’s WALL-E is in the Criterion Collection – not because the movie’s bad (it should, in fact, be in there) or that Criterion is “above it,” but that it is the sole Pixar representative among the 3,000-odd films from Abbasi to Zwigoff. For some reason, I was under the impression that this was due to a deal that they’d struck with Disney, and that the lack of a more extensive Pixar presence was due to ongoing rights issues (I’d certainly buy a Monsters, Inc. disc the day it came out). As is often the case, I was wrong. Stanton himself went to Criterion and asked whether that film could join the ranks as a “one-off,” which goes a long way toward explaining his decision to direct something like In the Blink of an Eye. This “epic,” which won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at Sundance this year, is a variant on the “all things are connected” narrative popular in modern literary science fiction, resembling a Cliff Notes version of Cloud Atlas without David Mitchell’s explorations of style and form or the earnest lunacy of its Wachowski/Tykwer screen adaptation.
In the Blink of an Eye unfolds across three eras – the Neolithic, where we follow a family of Neanderthals as they struggle to survive; the present, where an anthropology post-doc (Rashida Jones) falls in love with a colleague (Daveed Diggs); and roughly 200 years in the future, where a pilot named Coakley (Kate McKinnon) is on a solo voyage to a new home for humanity. That each of these stories parallel each other should come as no surprise, nor should it that they’re not self-contained short films, as Stanton frequently cross-cuts to provide a much-too-obvious guide as to what we should be feeling at any given moment. It’s strongest when it’s aping Kubrick – the introduction contains several smart match cuts that allow us to transition across eras (for instance, cutting from the Neanderthal parents having sex in a fur-covered blanket-tent to Jones’ failed first hook-up with Diggs via their shared blanket-shaking) – but Stanton quickly ditches this approach because it’d be that much more obvious and difficult to sustain throughout.
The stories themselves are relatively uninteresting when laid out, as we’re mainly playing Where’s Waldo with details, searching for bits and pieces that connect them in a literal or metaphorical fashion. There’s a pivotal object that unites the tales in a thuddingly and painfully obvious way, mostly so that the Neanderthal era isn’t just totally left out to dry, and to prove that, even if we destroy the Earth and make it so that Kate McKinnon can live forever, the most painfully sentimental elements of our psychologies will survive under the lights of different stars. Evaluated individually, it’s strange that, for a filmmaker so used to far-flung settings and scenarios, it’s the modern-day segment that is the most successful at its aims. Jones and Diggs are a swell screen pairing, with Diggs being the movie’s sole bit of soul, serving a kind of genial sweetness that highlights the best aspects of humanity – patience, loyalty, warmth, humor – without laying it on too thick. He’s goofy (and Jones is frequently upset) enough that it never becomes treacly, and their romance is affecting, ending on a sad and sweet note that does its best to supply the other two segments with a resonance they can’t supply on their own.
Worse, Stanton’s need to make sure his plots connect in precious and precise fashion has unintended consequences in how they ultimately impact one another. This specifically applies to the modern-day and future sequences, which, simply by being the closest in time, have a more direct connection than they would to characters some 45,000 years in the past, but “small galaxy syndrome” affects them more than one would hope.* There’s an unintended dystopic element in McKinnon’s segment, in that she’s on that ship without a choice, having been genetically engineered to complete the centuries-long mission in total isolation. The modern-day characters directly shape how her reality came to be, and there’s nothing in the narrative to suggest otherwise: The GATTACA future springs from that light romance, which makes it feel ickier than it should. This feels like a Silicon Valley-style “unintended consequence,” where the net benefits are overstressed to hide the messier reality beneath the surface, and a gentler touch would keep one immersed in the story without those pesky intrusive thoughts coming up along the way.
The more science-fiction-styled tales echo Stanton’s previous work, specifically WALL-E, in the silent-esque style of the prehistory segment and in the AI-human connection aboard the spaceship as McKinnon and her not-HAL try to solve a plant-based problem. It feels like he’s simply playing the hits instead of finding a new variation on those themes, and they’re stylistically surprising in how flat they are. They’re well-executed in some regards – I’ll always admire a Quest for Fire-style attempt at realizing Neanderthal culture, given the imagination required to have it succeed on screen, from creating languages to make-up – but they’re set up to fail through their juxtaposition. When something interesting happens in one of the stories, Stanton cuts away, fracturing our attention to ensure that his parallels are understood by even the most inattentive viewer. This is a mistake Mitchell avoided by having his stories segmented in a kind of narrative arpeggio, where the ascent established each stylistic framework and time period, the highest note – the far-future post-iron age tale told in Riddley Walker pidgin English – was held the longest, and the back half of the scale teased out the details that connected each story. There’s no grace in the structure or wonder in the visuals, and it blunts the impact of Stanton’s jabs at epic poignancy.
His ambition is impressive – after tasting greatness with Finding Nemo, Stanton decided he’d devote himself to making meaningful, epochal cinema worth waiting decades for. He was the go-to guy for realizing “dream projects,” which is why he chose to bring WALL-E to the screen after a decade-long wait, and it’s why he was the fall guy for directing a proper adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars (released under the far more unappealing title of John Carter to not step on Belle and Jasmine’s territory) after it spent a century in some variety of development hell. His best work centers on landscapes – the Great Barrier Reef, the garbage-strewn, desecrated Earth, the surreal plains of the Martian surface – which visually depict his close-held environmentalist beliefs in a fashion that’s inherently cinematic. It’s amazing what he can do without those trappings, as demonstrated in the minor modern-day drama, which makes the dull spaceship interiors and generic Ansel Adams landscapes of the prehistoric all the more surprising in how ineffective and weightless they are.
They’re dully “pretty,” rather than awe-inspiring, and that, in a way, sums up the entirety of In the Blink of an Eye. It can’t hit the notes Stanton wants it to because it needs to be cohesive in a narrative sense, not an emotional one. It’s why the dinosaurs work in Malick’s The Tree of Life and don’t in its imitators, connecting an average family in the ‘50s Midwest to the grandeur of a cosmic tale whose scale and meaning we’ll only ever be able to understand in part. Here, we’re just following Stanton as he connects the causal dots, with no room for the insignificant and even less space for wonder.
* This is a term taken from Star Wars fandom to explain why, in a galaxy with billions of inhabitants, Han Solo keeps showing up even when he’s not needed to make the story work.